“Then Ouden came, the Celestial Nothingness. ‘Put away such toys as that,’ Ouden said. ‘I am your god and your king.’ And so he has been god and king for all Programmed Persons from that day till this. And quite soon he will be god and king of all beings of every sort. But we were his first people, we the mechanicals. He grows and grows, and all the other kings die.
“But last night I rejected him! I thought about it all the night, and I rejected him. So, what am I now? I am not machine and I am not man. What is left to one who has rid himself of the deified nothingness? I cannot be left with nothing. It was the Nothing that I rejected.”
There was no response to this shrill little pleading of Scrivener. They all looked at him with half-shut eyes that frightened him. Scrivener had become alien to both his recensions.
They began to climb again.
Astrobe below them was a golden haze, and greenery underneath the gold. But here the air had become blue. Like Earth air, Thomas thought. They had ascended at least two kilometers in vertical distance. The mountain spire was irregular and rough. There was always hand-hold and foot-hold, but often of slashing sharpness.
And high above them on an outcropping there stood a boy or a young man. He seemed a spire-mirage, for there are such. But how had he got there and they not seen him before?
“It is my brother Adam,” Evita said. “I love him, but he is a bad omen. His coming always signifies death, usually his own, but he often takes others with him. He comes often during times of crisis, and he dies in bloody battles for what he believes is a cause. He is very good at dying. He does it a lot.”
The doughnut-shaped cloud around the spire above them had turned gray and blue and black. It was full of sparks and fire. It was now an electric torus.
A Commer’s Condor, swooping very near to them on black wings, cried out croakingly, “Thomas More is a fink!”
“What did that fellow say?” Thomas shouted. “Was he not a bird? How could he cry out at me? But I heard him and saw him.”
“No, you didn’t, Thomas,” the green-robe said. “You didn’t believe the things that you did see yesterday and the night; and now you see and hear things that are not there. This was hallucination. From here on up we are in the region of hallucination. The most rational man ever born, if he ascend here, will suffer such. They are fluffs of ball-lightning hovering about Electric Mountain; they are wind and spark and charged air. The shapes they take are both objective and subjective. One can shape them a little with one’s own mind. I once met a talking horse on the ridge right above us, and talking horses are not able to scramble up this high on the spire.”
They came up to the boy Adam, and he joined their party silently. So handsome a boy, though his sister Evita had once said that he was completely empty-headed. Never mind, he maintained his silence, so who should know? He moved well, he climbed well, it was said that he died well. He could have been the statue Greek Youth except that he seemed Jewish. The spinodeltoid and posterior trapezius (the bow-bending muscles) were well developed, and the bow had never been used on Astrobe. Ah, he was old statuary all right, quite well done. He was nude and nobody noticed. Had he been nude in all his other manifestations?
They went up and up. They came through the gray torus cloud and into other clouds that were gathering. The continental layout was open below them. It was now clear and bright below them, and misty only in the little cone above them.
With a shiver of triumph they came to the top. It was a crooked-shaped plateau, an iron-rock slope that looked like sponge and smelled of ozone. And someone had been there before them, very recently.
The one who had been there was both necromancer and haruspex, and his recent studies were still spread out on the iron-rock. But how had Walter Copperhead gotten there before them, how had he slipped down through them again, how had he avoided the Programmed Killers (if he had avoided them), and how had he managed to slay a giant rouk? It was the entrails of a rouk, the largest bird of Astrobe, that were spread out there. Elephant entrails were as nothing to these. Surely he had found the answers of riddles here. If they are not in the entrails of rouk, killed and spread out and studied on the top of Electric Mountain, then they are not anywhere in the art of haruspices.
“Bless him, I love him and he loves them,” Evita said. “I’d leave him my own did I know that he will die before me.”
And another sort of entrails were spread out for them to see. It had come on first dusk as they stood there, and they drank in the view as though it were new apple-wine. It was the entrails of the planet below them. There were the Ferals, and the Glebe, and the String of Cities. There was the black-green Astrobe of the feral strip they had just traversed, and the golden Astrobe of the cultivated regions. There were the great golden cities at their close intervals. And there was black Cathead and the gray Barrio. All of them giant things!
The branch of the sea that cradled Wu Town and ended in a splinter of estuaries and canals at Cathead was a black-blue-green monster, writhing with strength and dotted with huge sea-harvesters. There was Cosmopolis standing high and wide in a special golden halo—the heart of civilized Astrobe.
“The Reparation Tower, which you see on the eastern fringe there, is the highest structure in Cosmopolis,” Evita said. “It was built about a hundred years ago by one of my sons who was planet president. He had some bad ideas, and he did not (in spite of the Reparation Tower) offer enough reparation. I have had bad luck with my sons who achieved world-presidence. I have not much more hope for my adopted son Thomas here.”
“The brat-child,” Thomas asked Paul and the green-robe in an aside, “is she really of an unnatural age?”
“I don’t know, Thomas,” the green-robe said. “Thirty-five years ago when I first saw her she was of the same apparent age as now. Remember that almost everything is possible.”
“Remember also that she lies a lot,” said Paul.
One could almost see the feral strips feeding the cultivated Astrobe and the golden cities with their controlled counterpoint ecology. The muscles and the nerves and the veins of the planet were revealed from this height. One could see the black cancer of Cathead eating into the land and the sea and clouding the air. And yet, as the green-robe had said, the civilized Astrobe was only a thin yellow froth on a small part of that world. The old orb-animal had but to shiver its hide and all would be gone. And it looked like a hide-shivering evening.
Electric Mountain could be climbed; it took nothing but strength and endurance and a little care. But could anyone ever climb Corona Mountain there that was sheer and overhung and appeared on the verge of toppling? Or Magnetic Mountain? Great Sky over us, look at that tor! Or Dynamo Mountain (which had been the feminine one in the mythologies, and the other three her consorts), which was highest of them all, who should climb her? These four high spires were known as the Thunder Mountains, a startling group.
In the rough diamond between them was a country so harsh as to make even the feral strips look tame. This was deeply muscled country that had sinuous depths and involved hills and ramparts. It was prototype nightmare country where everything was bigger and woolier. It was heap upon heap, and spires rising in clusters to the cross-buttressed heights of the mountains. And now, as the darkness began more to deepen, all the high places were outlined with an electric blue glow.
“It uplifts the soul,” Thomas said with some awe.
“Be careful, little Thomas,” Evita jibed. “What has uplift to do with the golden mediocrity of Astrobe? With the blessed levelness? And the soul, Thomas, is it not an obscenity and a superstition, except for a little while in the morning?”
“Push me nowt so far, brat-child. I say me my words and I think me my thoughts, but to what should they correspond? And yet I can see that, when I become world president, these high feelings will have to be leveled down. They become too rich for the imagination.”
“Aye, Tho
mas, you’ll tell the mountains to lie down like puppies,” the green-robe said. “And the lightning, you will tell it to get back in its sheath. Do you not know that this also is a part of the controlled ecology of Astrobe? The high wild feelings attract a very small number of persons, and they repel the others. And only a very small number of persons are needed here for the balance. The persons who hold these tall feelings are regarded as animals among the animals, part of the fauna-balance of the wild lands. Even the high lightning here (which you will be amazed at very soon) is treated as a commodity like any other commodity. It is packaged and shipped down to golden Astrobe, packaged as rain-trapped nitrogen and shipped by natural flow to the ultimate consumer. That is all it is—from your viewpoint, not from mine—but it does come in a flashy package.”
And very soon the lightning did begin in spectacular earnest. Corona Mountain drew bolts out of the sky that appeared a hundred kilometers long. The persons of the party seemed transparent or interiorly illuminated from the intense glow of it. It is odd when you can see the bones of skull and rib-cage of a companion by a flash so bright that it has the properties of penetrating rays.
Then the bolts of white and gold fire began to whip from peak to peak. A bull-whip thirty-five kilometers long snapped from Corona Mountain to Magnetic Mountain with a crooked light that literally blinded them all for a while. Here was the mystery of motion, the old paradox solved, a whip of light going so fast that it was in more than one place at one time. It was on every jag and crag at once, and yet it was but a single point of light, only a streak in being of simultaneous appearance. Or was it the empyrean itself, the infinity of blinding light that is everywhere in the outside but is seen only when the false sky is ripped open for the blinding moment?
Then Electric Mountain itself was struck by a bolt that boiled the air and melted the rocks, and the thunder-clap knocked them all to their knees. Thunder-struck, they were literally astonished (which is the same thing latinized), impaled and numbed in every sense by the blow that shook the mountain.
“Ah, what can come after such a blow as that?” Thomas sighed.
“From below,” the boy Adam cried out. “It comes a thunder with more sulphur in it! They strike while we are blinded and amazed! Man ramparts! Roll boulders! Topple them!”
“Who’s been doing the thinking for this outfit?” Evita shrilled. “I’d intended to, but we’ve all left our wits. The iron dogs are on us! Are we people still, or do we fall to them?”
The Programmed Killers surged up from below while total darkness alternated with white light and black light, all of them blinding.
“Not me, you tin scurrae,” Thomas shouted, “not me, you things, I’ve nowt been false to the vision. I’ve been false to everything else.” He sent a small boulder down on them in a two-handed heave. “I’m not so partisan of you as I was, tinhorns. You make a mistake, and it is not to be tolerated that someone makes a mistake as to myself. Not me, you clanking fools, not me! I’d never threaten the Dream of Astrobe. Leave off!
“No? You will not? Have at it, then, you monster machines! I’ll battle you to any end you want!”
Thomas roared and carried on; others fought silently; but the battle was not going well for his party. The boy Adam, faster and more mercurial than the rest of them, toppled one of the Programmed Killers backwards, and it fell a thousand meters through the glancing and sheer darkness. And, at the same instant and in a distant place, another Programmed Killer was created to take its place and was given the same assignment.
Paul and the green-robe, Scrivener and Thomas, Maxwell and the Devil-kid Evita, rolled down boulders on them and fought down on them from above.
“Drive down in the narrow slot between the neck-piece and the lorica or breast-plate,” the green-robe shouted, and he had lashed a hand-knife onto a pole to make a spear or pike for just such driving. “There is a nexus there, a relay center. Get them there in that narrow slot, or they get us wherever we stand!”
“Ah, I am the one they disregard,” Slider said sadly, a whispered regret that cut through the bedlam. “So, I am no threat to them at all? I thought that I would be. I’d gladly die, but I do not like being treated as though I were already dead.”
“We’ve changed places, you whelp,” Scrivener howled. “Who’s the man now? And who’s the machine? Me they do not disregard! I threaten their thing! I oppose it as strongly as the roughest man in Cathead. Backwards and down you go, you clanking Devil! I’ll battle you all while there’s life left in me.”
But it was only for a little while. And then there was no life left in Scrivener. He had opted for a man very late, and the machines knew the diagram of him as a machine. The Programmed Raiders smashed Scrivener dead there. Every flicker in him, both of man and machine, came to a stop.
The battle in the sky still dwarfed the death-battle on the mountain spire. The thunder burst ears and knocked the breath out of body. It scrambled wits, both human-chemical and programmed gell-cell mechanical-magnetic. The light from the sky turned ordinary light black, and there were big empty grinning faces in the sky like high cliffs that had been there always. Big faces that had always been there, but never seen except by the most intense flash of the insane lightning.
“It’s the many faces of Ouden, their great Nothingness and King,” Maxwell cried. “Where is the face of our King? Would we know it if we saw it?”
And now the lightning had reached hysterical heights, as had the thunder and the relentless assault of the Programmed Killers. Bleeding ears and blinded eyes! And the rock-iron surface slippery with the entrails of those who were first ripped apart.
“On the third next bolt we go down,” Evita cried to Thomas in a sharp underneath voice that got through to his stunned ears. “You and the Paul and the I. The others are already too blood-drained and broken to get through.”
“What, brat? Go down where and how?” Thomas croaked as he was being overpowered and near split open himself.
“Your brains, Thomas, use them. We go then or never. Be a man and think like a man! Follow your intuition when the moment comes, and it will be narrower than the lightning-moment.”
A blow that literally burned the eyes and choked the lungs with an intake of light! A thunder-smash that knocked them all flat, men and machines! And they were to it again after the narrow moment. The boy Adam died in glorious gore, howling defiance. He was good at dying, Evita had said. He had done it before.
A second bolt coming at the same time from the sky and from Corona Mountain! Rocks melted and ran like water. The thunder-shock like a deadly blow in the deep bowels! And the green-robe died of a smash between the throat and the lorica. He died loudly but not unhappily. He was a good one.
“Thou art a priest forever according to the order of Melchisedech,” Paul gave his requiem. “Watch to your left there, Maxwell! Oh well, never mind then. Too late.”
In the darkness deep beyond belief, Maxwell’s body had been smashed before Paul’s warning could be heeded, and his odd spirit had been sundered from that broken body. Never mind. Maxwell had a trick of turning up again. An oddity of his.
“Be paralyzed now and be you transfixed forever,” Evita warned in the low voice. Now it was at hand, the last narrow moment at which even mad escape could be thought of.
The third bolt, ripping from Corona Mountain to Electric Mountain, blinding and transfixing machines as well as humans for the much less than an instant of it.
Down! Down! With all mad speed, down, and one slip is hurtling death.
Down during the light that is more blinding than any darkness; down, using a narrower moment than the lightning-moment itself. Down through the darkness that is darkness indeed. Down through the clap that stuns and knocks out both sensors and senses, already down a great hurtling drop before the instantaneous blast of the thunder.
Then continuing down for a minute, for a quarter, for an hour, d
iscovered and howled after and followed by swift iron trackers.
Down onto the lower plateau and down again, while a part of the Programmed follow them closely, and the rest complete the tall trap on the pinnacle to mutilate and record what is left: three dead humans, one dead hybrid whose final pattern shows that he opted for human late, one gibbering creature still alive but disregarded, since he represented no threat to the Dream or to anything.
But three of their prey have escaped them, have fallen like lightning down the spire in a lightning-instant.
Never mind. If the Programmed do not get them this night, they will get them at another time. And the advance scrim of the Programmed have not given up on getting them this night.
Thomas and Paul and the brat-child Evita were all strong on their legs and possessed of a sturdy life-urge. They were no longer in the middle of the towering thunder-storm and they felt certain that their senses were returning to life after their stunning. The storm was above them now and they were no more in the middle of the display. But they were charged and full of spark. They glowed with coronas about them, blue electric auras. They shined and hissed like ghosts.
They came down into the wild savanna country just as the sky broke open. It was a torrential downpour, a giant rain that could not be exaggerated. A part of the neat balance that kept Golden Astrobe golden, still it was savage water from the upped abyss, the deluge itself.
They went at a great pace all the night to escape it, and every brook was a raging river. It was already false dawn before they could get a glimpse of each other’s faces, and all three of them, Thomas and Paul and Evita, had suffered a deep change. They had been transfigured on the mountain. They were not quite the same people they had been. Something new had been burned into them.
Past Master Page 14
